Vancouver Jazz Festival's female forces led by ElisapieBack to video

The 34th TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival kicks off this week with over 150 free shows and hundreds of ticketed ones as well. Acclaimed for its showcasing of some of the most adventurous improvisers on the global scene, the festival has developed a deserved international recognition for its cutting-edge booking. This year, it can add another aspect to that reputation.

The festival has a serious focus on showcasing female players and bandleaders.

Jazz, like all other musical genres, has been a boy’s club and festival programming has reflected this. But thanks to the work of people such as the late founding artistic director Ken Pickering and programmer Rainbow Robert, female musicians have enjoyed more of a presence in the event program, and all the better for listeners as acclaimed artists such as Chicago trumpeter Jamie Branch (June 30, Ironworks), pianist Kris Davis (June 28, Ironworks) and classical singer, multi-instrumentalist, transgender artist and experimental electronic pioneer Beverly Glenn Copeland (June 25, Performance Works) are among a few of those who will grace local stages at this festival.

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With the definition of jazz long having moved past guidelines imposed by staunch traditionalists, the variety of performers coming at the genre from different directions has grown.

This means you can have vocalists such as Juno Award-winning singer Laila Biali (June 22, Pyatt Hall) or bass player/bandleader/belter Jen Hodge (June 26, Guilt and Co.) swinging like mad. Or you can enjoy the fusion of Inuk folk music, avant-garde chanson, post-rock and more that Elisapie Isaac (June 23, Performance Works) performs. The Montreal-based singer/filmmaker/activist, who goes by Elisapie, has seen her new Bonsound album Ballad of the Runaway Girl become one of the more buzzed-about Canadian releases of the year. Her local performance is one of her few Canadian dates as she finds herself booked across Europe this festival season.

“My fourth album is the first to get a release over there, so I’m coming in as a new artist, and it’s weird,” said Elisapie. “There are people showing up at these fairly large venues and singing along and getting very emotional about the music and it’s far beyond what I expected. I was really prepared to go to France and have to explain a lot about being an Inuk girl and not living in an igloo and so on, and it’s been a welcome thing to find them better informed and really willing.”

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From her cover of Willie Thrasher’s anthem Wolves Don’t Live By the Rules to powerful personal songs such as Arnaq and the title track, The Ballad of the Runaway Girl is intended to both reflect the singer’s life but also that of the North. Writing in Inuktitut, French and English, the 11 songs tackle issues of family, tradition, romance and culture. Many of the tunes have accompanying videos that fit into narrative lines.

She is a filmmaker who has made the 2003 NFB documentary If the Weather Permits about modern life in her home community of Salluit and produced a new three-part film titled Una this year that shows an encounter between the artist and her biological mother, who was forced to put her daughter up for adoption. It’s a moving work.

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And it’s all part of her artistic journey to educate and heal, says the singer.

“If we never talk about it and study each other and get to know each other, how will we see ignorance go,” she said. “Indigenous and Inuit people are a lot more aware and free to express themselves now and people are prepared to listen about all the shit that happened over the last 100 years. We are less hopeless, less helpless and maybe going to see the result of this big ‘spring cleaning.’ ”

While words form a great part of her work, the live performance is the kind of freewheeling show that jazz fans can latch onto. Folk/rock icons such as Neil Young and Bob Dylan and northern writers like Willie Thrasher and others certainly shaped her writing, but so too does the post/rock atmospheric music scene associated with Montreal. Her longtime band includes guitarist Joe Grass (Patrick Watson), bassist/guitarist/keyboardist Joshua Toal (Plants & Animals) and drummer Evan Tighe (Basia Bulat). They have really been able to bring her new material to life onstage.

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Inuk singer singer/filmmaker/broadcaster Elisapie performs at Performance Works on Granville Island on June 23 at 8 p.m.Le Pigeon

“Originally, we thought that there would be two different demos, one of covers and one of my own songs,” she said. “But then this magical thing came to be where Joe and I hit on this very urgent, very instinctive approach to what are very edgy, intense songs about survival, the health of the land and the truth. And at a cottage by a lake, Joe and I and the band got together in a circle and recorded everything together in a week.”

That live, off-the-floor urgency translated to the Ballad of the Runaway Girl, which delivers without pristine and meticulous mastering. There is a tension on the studio results, which is even more so in concert footage. Songs such as Animal and Call of the Moose become opportunities for high-intensity explorations live.

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“I entered into this at a difficult time, feeling very insecure and finished with a renewed sense of strength and purpose,” she said. “We push it even more live and it’s so much fun to improvise and give these songs the chance to be free and go further. That free-ness is something we need to have and, I guess, it fits the jazz thing.”

As for the number of women featured at this year’s festival and, additionally, having an Indigenous artist in residence participating in collaborative works and more — well, bring it on.

“It’s exploding and I’m so lucky to be a part of it, and see that people want to hear us and they are listening,” she said. “As a mother, as a grandmother, as a woman, I’m still angry, but I think that we have this strong ability now to turn this into something powerful and beautiful.

“There is so much poetry, beauty and vision that we thought was only on the outside, and we are realizing it’s precious and rich on the inside, too.”

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